PAUL ADAMS -
Ideas, arguments, and musings about ethics in relation to culture, religion, and public policy

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Another Anti-Catholic Rant from the New York Times

Once again, a shamelessly biased anti-Catholic rant from Maureen Dowd. (On the phenomenon of anti-Catholic Catholics like Dowd, Garry Wills, et al., see The New Anti-Catholicism by Philip Jenkins.) Contrary to the claim in her latest op-ed piece, the Vatican said nothing to equate mock ordinations of women and clergy sex abuse. Yes, it was a PR mistake--another own goal--to address these grave but utterly different offenses in the same document, but that's all.

As for the two "inquisitions" of nuns that exercise Ms. Dowd so mightily, these visitations were long overdue. The investigations of the seminaries that had adopted an actively homosexual culture, aided and abetted by nuns, came much too late too. (See Michael Rose's Goodbye, Good Men for details.) The Church's older religious orders and liberal seminaries did immense damage to the Church, infected as they were by a Sixties climate of "anything goes" in faith and morals. The irony is that the liberals who promoted these developments in the 1970s (when clergy sex abuse rose to the level of the male population as a whole before falling back close to zero today) are using the crisis they helped create to denounce the Vatican's efforts to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, much to the annoyance of the aging liberals, it is the young, orthodox, and faithful parts of the Church, the new strict religious communities and seminaries, that are thriving as the liberal Catholic project dies off. Still, it will take decades for the Church to recover from the damage in every area--in catechesis, liturgy, architecture, music, ecclesiology, theology, and morals--that that liberal project wrought.